Maine Region Guide

Maine offers something the rest of the eastern seaboard has largely built over: a working coastline. The lobster boats are not a heritage display, the fishing harbours still fish, and beyond the southern beach towns the shore is granite, spruce and islands rather than development. Acadia is the only national park in the northeast, and the interior holds more forest than any other state.

The difficulty is that the season is genuinely short and everyone uses the same weeks of it. July and August fill the coast, Acadia meters its most popular road by reservation, and lodging in Bar Harbor and Kennebunkport is booked months ahead at its highest rates of the year.

The better approach is to come in September, when the water is at its warmest, the crowds have gone and the weather is at its most settled. If summer is the only option, base yourself away from the headline towns and drive in early, and take the coast in one region rather than trying to cover its whole length.

If you travel slowly

Pick one stretch of coast and stay put. The peninsulas between Portland and Acadia — Harpswell, Boothbay, Pemaquid — reward a week of short drives far more than a dash from one headline town to the next.

If you want to see the essentials

Acadia and Bar Harbor, Portland's Old Port and working waterfront, and Portland Head Light at Cape Elizabeth cover most of what people picture when they picture Maine.

If you seek local character

Eat lobster at a pound rather than a restaurant — a shed by the water with picnic tables, where you pick your lobster and eat it off a paper plate. The difference is in the price and the setting, not the lobster.

If you want to go beyond the obvious

Go north. Baxter State Park and Katahdin, the Downeast coast beyond Acadia, and the St John Valley with its Acadian French are barely touched by the summer traffic that fills the south.

Acadia absorbs several million visitors a year on a small island, and manages it actively: the Cadillac Summit Road requires a vehicle reservation in season, and the free Island Explorer shuttle exists to keep cars out. Using the shuttle is the single most useful thing a visitor can do here.

The coast is a working one. Lobster buoys mark gear that people earn a living from — give them a wide berth in any boat — and the harbours are places of business before they are scenery.

Tidepools and rockweed along the shore are living habitat rather than decoration, and the granite is genuinely slippery where it is wet. Stay off closed dunes in the southern beach towns, which hold the sand in place.

Much of inland Maine is privately owned timberland that the public is permitted to use rather than entitled to. That access depends on visitors treating it carefully.

September is the best month on the coast: the sea is at its warmest after a summer of heating, the crowds have gone home, and the weather is settled. Early October adds foliage inland.

July and August are the peak in every sense — warmest air, busiest towns, highest prices, and everything open. It is also when Acadia is at its most managed.

Late May and June are quiet and green but bring black flies inland, which are not a minor irritation in the north woods. The coast is largely spared.

Winter means skiing at Sugarloaf and Sunday River and a coast that mostly closes; many coastal businesses shut from late October to May. April is mud season and the one month with little to recommend it.

Year-round relative cost index vs state average

The season matters more than the place: the same coastal room can cost three times in August what it costs in May, and much of the difference disappears entirely after Labor Day.